We have some early entrance poll results from CNN, which, like all early entrance and exit polling, should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, the results do tell us something about what the GOP electorate in Iowa looks like.
Do you consider yourself part of the MAGA movement? Fifty-three percent say yes. Forty-one percent say no.
Did Joe Biden legitimately win the White House in 2020? Sixty-eight percent say no. Twenty-eight percent say yes.
Is Trump still fit for the presidency if he’s convicted of a crime? Sixty-five percent say yes. Only 32 percent disagree.
A quick reminder of how things finished up for the last competitive GOP Iowa caucuses in 2016:
- Ted Cruz, 28 percent
- Donald Trump, 24 percent
- Marco Rubio, 23 percent
- Ben Carson, 9 percent
- Rand Paul, 5 percent
- Jeb Bush, 3 percent
- Carly Fiorina, 2 percent
- John Kasich, 2 percent
- Mike Huckabee, 2 percent
- Chris Christie, 2 percent
- Rick Santorum, 1 percent
And the last ones before that in 2012:
- Rick Santorum, 25 percent
- Mitt Romney, 25 percent
- Ron Paul, 21 percent
- Newt Gingrich, 13 percent
- Rick Perry, 10 percent
- Michele Bachmann, 5 percent
- Jon Huntsman, 1 percent
And 2008:
- Mike Huckabee, 34 percent
- Mitt Romney, 25 percent
- Fred Thompson, 13 percent
- John McCain, 13 percent
- Ron Paul, 10 percent
- Rudy Giuliani, 3 percent
Below, via Wikipedia, is a map of the 2016 Iowa caucus. If you’re looking for signs that DeSantis and/or Haley are doing well or badly tonight, compare with this map, substituting DeSantis for Cruz and Haley for Rubio. Haley is running a thematically very different campaign from Rubio, who put a lot more stress on his Christian social conservatism, but fundamentally, Trump is Trump, DeSantis is pitching to the Cruz “true conservative” vote, and Haley is (like Rubio) aiming at voters who are upwardly mobile, educated, hawkish on foreign affairs, and sympathetic to trade and immigration. That means she will likely depend upon the same base of urban and college-town voters around Des Moines, Dubuque, and Iowa City.
@dmclaughlin: And a big chunk of those votes were cast well after the nominations were already effectively decided. It’s almost as though our current primary system is not very democratic and does not produce candidates that most voters want to see lead the country.
Continuing on the “popular in primaries isn’t the same as popular in the general election” theme: Trump got 14 million votes in the 2016 primaries. Biden got 19.1 million votes in the 2020 primaries.
155 million people voted in the 2020 general election.
The big overarching question for Iowa tonight has to be: Will anything change? The remarkable thing about this primary season so far is how constant everything has been. Campaigns have spent millions of dollars, yet Trump remains the far-and-away frontrunner. The only major change we’ve seen so far this primary season has been Nikki Haley, who went from also-ran to a contender for second place. But again, that’s for second place. Another constant: Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings. Since the Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021, he has been underwater, fluctuating around 40 percent approval. For all the talk about how he was going to be a unifier who returned the presidency to normal after the Trump years, his approval ratings have been almost the same as Trump’s from about the one-year mark on in each man’s respective term. The American people are not looking forward to the prospect of voting for either Trump or Biden for president eleven months from now. Yet based on all the evidence so far, that choice seems to be where things are headed.
A helpful piece from Politico’s Steven Shepard highlights a few numbers to keep in mind while watching Iowa’s caucus results roll in tonight. Among them, 34 percent. That’s the percentage of respondents to this weekend’s NBC News/Des Moines Register survey who described themselves as first-time caucus-goers. A clichéd narrative maintains that caucusing every four years has become part of Iowans’ identities. They will brave any adverse condition to fulfil their duties. But if caucusing is part of your identity, you’ve probably done it before. Will the abominable weather conditions on the ground in Iowa deter first-timers? If it does, it will put downward pressure on Donald Trump’s totals. Of that 34 percent, a majority told NBC News/DMR pollsters they planned to caucus for Trump.
Almost no one expects Donald Trump to lose tonight’s caucuses. But how Trump wins doubtlessly matters – for donors and fundraisers supporting Trump’s opponents, their campaigns, and the Republican Party more broadly. So, what does a poor performance by Donald Trump look like? Is it finishing with less than a majority of the vote, underperforming the polling average he took with him into tonight’s caucuses? Or is it his margin of victory? If Trump underperforms but still beats his nearest opponent by 20 points or more, will anyone notice that he failed to win over a majority of caucus-goers?
Here’s a number to watch: 186,932. That’s how many people voted in the 2016 Republican caucus. That was up almost 50% from 2012, when 121,501 Iowans voted. With Iowa’s population growing steadily since the late 1980s (up from about 3.1 million to 3.2 million over the past 8 years), one would expect – all things being equal – that turnout tonight would be larger than in 2016. But all things are not equal: the weather is terrible and the polls don’t show a competitive contest. If turnout is up, that would probably be good news for the DeSantis and/or Haley campaigns, each of which are relying on ground games to bring more voters to the polls who don’t typically vote in caucuses.
By contrast, 1924 was the last time fewer than a million people voted in the presidential general election in Iowa. Since women were granted the vote, no Republican candidate has earned fewer than 400,000 votes in Iowa in November, and none since the Civil War has earned fewer than 100,000 votes. The caucus electorate really is a small, unrepresentative sample of who votes in November.
Jeff,
I just saw the no-reason-to-hope Packers eject a second-seeded Cowboys from the playoffs. Maybe something similar could happen in Iowa, too.
My favorite sports/politics line comes from former Jags journo Vic Ketchman, who’d tell of the first kickoff of the year as being the moment when “the baloney stops” — i.e., everything to this point has been hype, nonsense, and bluster. It’s only now, when votes begin to be counted, that we know where the candidates stand.
I can’t wait.